


Winterlong

by capalxii



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 12:30:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1226299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capalxii/pseuds/capalxii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Gallifrey is back, in some pocket somewhere it was never meant to be in, churning up the rest of the universe like meat in a grinder, and the Doctor is full of golden energy and regeneration chemicals that he hasn't had to handle for hundreds of years. He's full of memories, too; she knows that he's left some things unsaid, dreams of centuries of blood and fire that wake him with quiet gasps more often than he thinks she knows. She knows that there's more beyond that which he doesn't tell her. A time lord is not meant to cope with these things alone. " Or: A series of scenes from the start of their first winter together through the end of their first winter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winterlong

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. This is absolutely going to be not canon-friendly by the start of series 8. I'm not even sure this is entirely canon-friendly up to the end of series 7. But they said "darker Doctor" so I grabbed onto that and ran with it.  
> 2\. The title is taken from the Neil Young song, but if this fic takes inspiration from any song it's probably Brandi Carlile's Looking Out.  
> 3\. This became much more grim than I'd expected it would be, but it still has something of a happy-ish ending.  
> 4\. This is also far more relationship/character-driven than anything else.

"May I--could I just-"

She's seen him, now, so many times jumping head first into the worst possible dangers. There had been times when he hadn't even said a word before turning into destruction itself, laying waste to whatever had gotten in his way, whatever had threatened the peace he'd been seeking. 

But his hands are hesitant on her skin. His fingers barely skate up her arm, over the thin cotton of her dress. The nervous ticks--the hand-wringing and nail-biting, the way he turns away from her when their words are too heated--show up only when they're alone, never when he has work to do. Never when he's focused like a laser on anything else in the universe. At first, she mistakes it for a lack of trust in her or some sort of dislike, until she realizes: it was hundreds of years before he'd seen her again, hundreds of years he'd sent her away for, and he's not quite convinced that he has any right to her now. 

It's not long before she decides what they both need is her hands on his first, pulling him up the steps, pulling him into her room, pulling him close enough to her that she can feel the beats of his hearts speeding up against her. 

*

When it first happens, she thinks that it should not have been easier to fall into this pattern with him, compared to his last self. His last self was the one who fell for her, and who she had fallen for in turn--and if they'd had more time, maybe, just maybe, but they hadn't. They hadn't had the chance to sink as deeply into each other as this. They hadn't had the chance to discover whether he would have liked it when she runs her hands through his hair, her fingers curling around his locks as she tugs un-gently and nips at his lower lip until he snarls at her.

But she has the chance here, and now, with this version of him who still lies to her but is honest under her touch. And so she takes it, because when she thinks about it, every other version of her that has known him has cared for every other version of him, so it can't possibly be different now. She knows now that he listens when she shows him how she wants it. That he lets her see the beast inside of him, wrenching it out of him to use whenever she feels like it. Though she hadn't had the chance to find this sort of honesty with his last self, she is more than willing to find it in him now. 

*

She moves through the universe linearly. She's not sure where he goes when he leaves on Thursday mornings, but she's sure that when he goes he moves in loops, circling around and back and forth until he finds a need for her permission again. Clara can build a life separate from him. Coffee with friends, grading papers, clubbing, grocery shopping. Ignoring the passive-aggressive commentary on her life from her dad's girlfriend. Her greatest danger is getting run over by a bus, or choking on a biscuit while nobody else is around. 

She'll go out with her friends; sometimes she completely forgets this other life she has. They live in the sun, or under bright gray skies, and things happen step by step by beautiful step. It's fulfilling in every way that counts, it's calming to have order in her world, but at night she dreams in blues and silvers and gold, and wakes with the chill of dark matter under her skin.

Clara is pondering coupons for milk when he knocks on her door. His hair is wilder than he normally keeps it, his eyes stormy, and his face rough with stubble. He looks at her like he wants to consume her as fire consumes a forest. "Come with me."

She forgets about the milk. 

*

The anger in him is always just below the surface. The others had had anger as well, but aside from one of them--the one in whom it was the most understandable, the one who'd been a walking open wound for so long before finding a girl in a shop who would run with him--they could control it. This one, though, could live up to every terrible name that had ever been given him. In the TARDIS, the anger gives him focus and his hands are deliberate and unfaltering at the controls as he moves through time and space, and he uses it as much as a weapon as an inspiration.

In her flat, on the worst nights: his tea shivers and spills over the brim of the cup, pooling in the saucer and she has to take it back from him to keep him from burning himself. The anger never comes towards her but she can see the fear in his eyes anyway. 

"You won't send me away," she says quietly, one evening when he is clenching his fists against the arms of his chair. It's as much an order as a question. "Not 'for my own good' or anything like that. Not for anything."

"If I had to," he replies. "If I became too--if I had to. What would you do if I did?"

Clara crosses her arms and stares at him hard. "What did I do the last time?"

"You came back."

"What makes you think I can't do that again?" He doesn't answer her. "Better off not even wasting your time trying," she adds. 

Nights like those, he always seems to disappear. But if she wakes up to him sliding in under the sheets, twining his long, temporarily steady fingers with hers and refusing to meet her eyes, she doesn't chide him for his absence. "Come here," she'll say, and he'll rest his cheek against her hair and his chest against her back until they can find sleep together. 

*

She catches him studying her sometimes. 

She'll be doing nothing at all--the normal things you do around a flat, picking up, ironing, paying the bills that manage to pile up even as she finds herself a thousand million light years away--and she will look up to see him staring so intensely at her. He'll look away as soon as she notices him, not guilty but still as though he thinks he shouldn't be doing it. 

She'd pressed a key into his hands; it had only been fair, as she'd had his key for some months (some centuries) and now he could come and go as he pleased. Usually, this means she comes home to find a new note, a new trinket, something alien and special that he'd wanted her to have without infringing too far into the parts of her life without him. But some days the pendulum swings so far in the other direction that it unsettles her a bit; he'll be seated in shadows or standing in a doorway not just as though he had the right to be there, but as though there was literally no other place he could be if he tried. The evening when she comes home from work and finds him waiting at the kitchen table, she overfills the soap in the dishwasher as his eyes map every particle of her being. Later, he'll trace patterns into her skin, circles and curves and whispered words in some long-dead language against the imperfections of her body. 

She learns the most common pattern quickly enough, and when she traces it against his chest for the first time, he goes boneless and speechless and stares at her like he hadn't realized she'd been studying him just as carefully. 

*

He seems to exist half a step out of sync with the rest of the universe. "Time travel," he says cheerfully, by way of explanation as he sprints around the console room, flying them somewhere new. "Things tend to get discombobulated. Sometimes you just don't know if you're coming or going."

She understands that aspect of it--the time she accidentally took a month-long vacation that she'd thought was only a weekender comes to mind--but it doesn't begin to explain everything. There are things he does, things he says, that make no sense and she catches him realizing his own nonsense more than once. Finally she tells him, "I can't help if you keep lying to me."

He denies it, anger snarling over--"why would I need your help, what if I'm trying to help you"--but she's adamant. She's never asked for his protection. She's fairly certain that he's the one needing protecting, just like he always has been, and she nearly begs him to tell her what from. By the end of it, she watches him digging his nails into his palms, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth before dropping his arms so stiff to his side that they start shaking just barely enough for her to notice, and confessing that he's barely coping with the new regeneration cycle, that fixed points in time seem to be coming un-fixed and un-fixed points seem to be fixed, that the very essence of time feels wrong to him and that that's never happened before-

Gallifrey is back, in some pocket somewhere it was never meant to be in, churning up the rest of the universe like meat in a grinder, and the Doctor is full of golden energy and regeneration chemicals that he hasn't had to handle for hundreds of years. He's full of memories, too; she knows that he's left some things unsaid, dreams of centuries of blood and fire that wake him with quiet gasps more often than he thinks she knows. She knows that there's more beyond that which he doesn't tell her. A time lord is not meant to cope with these things alone. She's terrified for him and a little bit of him, but she unfurls his fingers, forces him to concentrate on not clenching his hands around hers, and litters kisses on his brow and cheeks whispering nothing at all in an attempt to keep him in one place.

*

She knows that when he stays the night and stays into the next day, it's been particularly bad for him out there, out beyond her life. She knows for a fact that her tiny, cluttered little flat is a refuge and that so is she. Sometimes in those moments she can't help but resent being a distracting puzzle to him. 

And yet she also knows that it's hypocritical of her, since he's as much a curiosity to her as she is to him. She wants earnestly to unravel him in any way she can. When she dreams, sometimes, whispers of her other lives with him come back to her, and sometimes she gets more than just whispers. But she's never known this inflection of him until now and she wants to pull apart his lies and examine the fibers of the man underneath. "What language is this?" she asks one night, tracing new words over his skin with the tip of her finger.

"My own," he says. His kisses down her neck are a language that doesn't need translating. "Would you like to learn another word?"

"Yes." He takes her hand and moves her finger across his chest, in circles and loops and lines that twine into each other. "What does it mean?" she asks.

His eyes are hooded and he smiles just so, the corners of his mouth ticking up before he presses his lips to her jaw. "It means, 'mine.'"

She tries it again. It's unfamiliar, but she's sure she'll learn it quickly enough; she's always had a knack for languages. "You've never used that one on me."

Something passes over his face; she's not sure if it's a flicker of a smile or a quick flinch. It might be both. "I didn't want to presume."

"But I can use it on you?" He says nothing, so she traces the word on him, over and over, tattooing him with it. She doesn't miss the way his hearts pick up speed or the way his breath catches in his throat at the same time that her nail catches on his skin. Feigning aloofness, she asks, "The first word I learned, do you remember it?"

"Yes." His voice is rough as sandpaper. 

"What did it mean? I'd only ever guessed."

The Doctor licks his lips and struggles to think. This is her favorite thing: the way she can make him go out of his massive brain, even if it's just for a moment, the way she can shut him off so completely and dissolve him to his most basic components, all by moving her small hands against his body. "It means...well, there's no direct translation, is there. It's more a feeling than a word."

Clara sits up at that, honestly curious and unable to pretend anything else. "What feeling is that?"

"Like--rain. After the scorching desert suns, like rain at night."

She grins wickedly. "I get you wet?"

He actually blushes. She hasn't seen him blush since before he was him. She's seen him flushed, yes, with anger, with passion, either brooding or dying for her touch, but she hasn't seen him bashful and hapless like this. It's something she hadn't realized she'd missed, but the color floods his pale cheeks and his mouth gapes open into a speechless smile and his eyes search out the ceiling of her room as he runs a hand through his hair and falls back against the bed. "No--yes--wait. That's not. Sorry."

Her fingertips on his ribs, she teases him with a laugh and says, "Then what?"

He licks his lips again and his face goes soft. "You make me feel clean," he says. The softness turns into something she can't read entirely, but something that troubles her nonetheless, and her troubles only increase when he adds, "Like I'm not a monster. Like there's nothing wrong with me."

Clara's hair falls like a curtain around her face as she leans in to kiss him. "You're not a monster," she says, her mouth still brushing his. "And there isn't anything wrong with you."

When he asks, it's with a voice that sounds both matter of fact and as lost as it's ever sounded. "Are you sure?"

*

It's a Friday when she comes back home to find him seated by the window that another fear of his comes tumbling out. "All I can think," he says, "is that I could have died on Trenzalore."

It doesn't sound to her like she's thanking him for the extra chance. Still, warily, half-sarcastically, she says, "You're welcome."

"It's just--I would have died knowing you were safe." There's anger, or fear, or both in his eyes as he looks at her in a side glance. "Knowing that I hadn't led you to your death. I don't get that anymore, do I?"

Clara swallows down anything else she might've said and says, "I'm still gonna die, aren't I? Could get hit by a car. Struck by lightning. Could be a perfectly normal way out, couldn't it?"

"Don't talk like that. I never get to leave anyone behind, I'm always the one being left."

She almost points out how petulantly childish he sounds, except he has a point. She'll be dust in the earth long before he goes, and at the end of time the only thing left of her will be his memories. "Would death have been a gift to you?" she asks. He doesn't seem able to answer. She shrugs. "Sorry. I'm selfish. Wouldn't have been a gift to me."

When he doesn't say a word for the rest of the night, she figures he's giving her the silent treatment. It's not until halfway through the next day that she realizes he simply doesn't know what to say.

*

He leaves soon after that. Wednesday comes and goes, then another comes and goes, then another. There are no letters or gifts like there would usually be if he were trying to give her space. Just as she starts to get restless she hears the sound of the TARDIS, and she rushes down into the cold winter evening to see him. Whether she's going to hug him or slap him, she's hasn't decided at first-

She sees his face and recoils. This is not her Doctor. She's not sure what he is. She's not sure he knows himself. "What did you do?" she asks, her voice so quiet that she's not sure he hears her.

"Nothing," he says but she's attuned to his lies now. Not that he's lying well anyway. There are his tells, the hand over his mouth, the fist clenching and unclenching by his side. He's even breathing differently, shallow and quick. "Nothing, I-" He takes a step towards her and she almost feels bad for the way his face falls when she takes a step back.

Her voice is steadier this time. "What did you do?" In the light of the streetlamps and windows, she notices his clothes. They're older, not threadbare but not nearly as fresh as they had been the last time she'd seen him. "How long?"

"What?"

"How long have you been gone? It's been a month for me-"

"I don't know." She can't stand this, feeling both like she has to help him and like she has to run as far from him as possible. His arms are stiff at his side, fists tight, and his face is twisted in shadow. "I don't remember--I think a year. I don't know." He's not lying and she can't stand this. 

Clara stops herself from taking another step back. "What did you do?"

A car passes by, its lights shining on his face, and for a fleeting moment she sees those big, sad eyes of his, bigger and sadder than she'd thought possible on this thunderous, rageful face. "Nothing." He sounds small. "Nothing. Please."

She walks towards him slowly. What little relief he has on his face disappears when he sees the caution on hers. "If you can't remember how long you've been away, how do you know you've done nothing?"

"Because I just didn't." His skin is drawn taut over something dark, something big, something she isn't sure he could contain even if he wanted to. His eyes are pleading with her but there's anger beneath the dismay, threatening to break the surface. "Do you understand?"

She searches his face for anything she can use. The truth is a snarl of his mouth, a flash of--hatred?--in his eyes. "Just tell me," she says cautiously. "Tell me, or you have to leave."

"I've been-" He runs his hands through his hair, scrubs at his face before his fists fall back to his sides. Something about him shifts. "I suppose I'll leave, then." It's a challenge. He's daring her to throw him away, almost as though he expects it. Her heart is fighting its way out of her chest, she's rooted to the spot as his wild-animal gaze sparks and sets fire to her veins, the cold air forgotten about entirely. "Shall I?"

Clara can't help it and she says, "You do realize you're terrifying right now."

"You should be terrified." He takes a step towards her. "I am terrible."

She catches it, there. It's not flaunting, and it's not pride. It is, of all things, loathing, staining the darkness of his voice like so much blood. "Do you really think-" She speaks slowly, deliberately, to ensure her voice isn't strangled by her own fear. "-that you could come here, say something like that, and not explain what you did?"

"I did nothing." His voice breaks on the last, and he stops. It's only when he begins to speak again that she realizes that had been the calm before the storm. Words tumble out of him, a jumbled mess of heat and death on some far-flung planet that he might have saved but its destruction was a fixed point except it wasn't fixed, not really, not until it was all over and it was too late and he was too slow and Clara realizes with harrowing chill that she's misread all of this. He wasn't lying about what he'd done. He was telling her that he had done absolutely nothing.

Both her hands are in his then, dragging him along until they're out of the cold. He's still talking as they enter her flat, but the only words he can form now are begging forgiveness and asking if she thinks him a monster now.

*

School is on break. She tries to keep him the entire time. Half the time he sits like a rag doll wherever she places him, tea growing cold unless she reminds him to drink it; the other half, he disappears for hours at a time that might be days or weeks, living like a whisper of movement in the shadows that she only spots out of the corners of her eyes. 

When she goes back to class, she's not very surprised to find him gone in the evening. He's gone all Tuesday as well. She strains to see the stars, to see if any of them blink out of existence or any new ones blink into being, to see proof of him somewhere in the universe. 

He comes back that Wednesday smelling of burning ozone and starstuff. Tiredly, she starts setting the table and says, "You can't just keep popping in and out of my life like some kind of boarder." He nods and turns to leave. With a roll of her eyes, she pulls at his arm and sits him down. "I mean, wouldn't it be easier if you stayed? If you just stopped running, at least until you got your head around all this?"

His voice sounds as though he hasn't used it in a decade, and when he speaks it sounds like he hadn't even thought her suggestion had been a possibility. "Would you let me?"

"I'm telling you to, aren't I? You are literally the stupidest smart person I know." She looks down with what she thinks is a frown but probably looks more like a pout, her hair falling over her eyes, guarding her vulnerabilities from his gaze. "Never liked it when you ran off without so much as a goodbye, and I hate the thought of you getting yourself into trouble without me around to bail you out."

The Doctor refuses to meet her eyes, instead looking at the table, the floor, anything else. Then, so quiet she almost doesn't hear it: "Bossy."

A smile passes over her face; it's the first one he's elicited in a very long time. "And short."

They're still not meeting each others' eyes, but he looks like a weight has been lifted off his chest. "And your nose is all funny."

It takes all of her strength not to throw her arms around him. Instead, she serves them leftovers for dinner and tells him about the brilliantly interesting plans she's drawn up for the new school term.

*

He stays through Wednesday, and then Thursday, and then he keeps staying. Clara still ponders coupons for milk. Now, an alien so old he doesn't even recall his own age--if age is even a legitimate concept for him--clips them for her. His hands are sure and the lines are steady.

He straightens the coupons and says, "We could just keep a cow on the TARDIS."

It takes her a moment to realize he's not joking. "That's not normal. I'd like to be normal, and that's really not normal."

When he looks up at her, his face is as fierce as ever but there's a smile in his eyes. "Dear, sweet girl. You're too extraordinary for normal, don't you know?"

The next morning, she, miraculously, for once, wakes before him. His arm is flung over her, his mouth soft against the curve of her shoulder, and the early morning sunlight is washing everything in her bedroom a gauzy yellow; his words come back to her as she watches dust motes sparkle and swirl in the hazy rays of light and she thinks the peaceful normalcy of his skin against hers is more extraordinary than anything.

*

The things outside her flat, he says, aren't safe for him. And being close to the TARDIS is enough most of the time. The TARDIS steadies him, envelopes him in some kind of protection against whatever it is that Gallifrey's presence is doing to him and to time, as though it is its own pocket universe, or as though her flat is a part of the TARDIS now. She's fairly certain that's not too far from the truth, as being in her flat has started to feel like being on board his ship. 

And it's not even his presence that's simply making her feel that way. Her bath is bigger now, she thinks. She knows her armoire is, having somehow made space for his clothes without her doing anything to clear out the clutter.

Clara comes home one day to find him fixing her sink. Of all the things she's experienced with him, this might be the strangest. "Was it even broken in the first place?" she asks, an incredulous smirk on her face.

"No," he says. A spanner lands with a thunk on the floor. "Well, it will have been. I think. Fixed point. Became un-fixed." He pops out from under the counter and smiles at her. "And I fixed it."

Worry creeps into her but she keeps it from showing. "...The sink?" she asks. "Or the point?"

"Both." He rubs his hands together and licks his lips, brows furrowed and slim shoulders tight. "I think I'm getting better at it."

She's cheering inside. She wants to cry. She wants to climb to the rooftop and scream. Instead, she says, "Glad experimenting with my plumbing could help."

"Yes." He bites his lip and busies himself unrolling his sleeves and pulling on his cardigan and coat. "Yes, the plumbing was the key all along."

She drops her purse on the couch, and as he passes by her to leave, she tugs the sleeve of his coat and pulls him to sit next to her. There's still so much guilt on his face, and no amount of household handiwork could erase it. Her head comes to rest on his chest, her legs are curled up under her, and she says, "You're not actually a god, you know."

"I know. And you're hardly the first person to tell me that."

"Bears repeating. I mean, what happened was horrible." This might be dangerous territory, she thinks; already he's tensed beneath her, his slim body uncomfortable under hers. "And I'm sorry. But you're not a god."

His hands are flexing into fists. "There were things I could've done-"

"And you did what you thought you could. You got a lot of them off the planet, right? Almost all of them. They're homeless, but they're on a ship, and they're alive?" Clara feels him sigh, hears a barely audible yes. She sits up next to him and puts her hands on his face, forcing him to look at her. "This isn't Gallifrey. It's not a repeat of that, or--or some kind of retribution from the universe for undoing what happened there. You're still a good man, and you still did good."

"I wasn't brave enough. If I'd have been more brave, but I wasn't."

Clara searches his face for some sign that he might not actually believe that. She doesn't find any. "I think you're plenty brave. You forget I've seen you in some pretty terrible states."

He frowns at her. "I thought you didn't remember anything from-"

"You're not the only one who knows how to lie to protect someone you love." She straddles him then, more so he is forced to stay where he is than for any other reason. "Sometimes the most brave thing you can do is get out of bed in the morning, moving forward in spite of everything. By my measure, you're pretty brave. Probably the bravest person I know."

He looks at her with a kind of haggard, baffled respect. "You humans. You've no idea, do you." 

Clara shrugs, not understanding what he's getting at. "Not really, no." She tucks herself back against him, idly traces the words she'd learned from him against his chest through his clothes. "Anyway. I'm sure the kitchen sink is happy you're doing better, Doctor."

His hand comes to rest hesitantly on her shoulder. Then it's carding through her hair, twisting strands lightly around his fingers as he kisses her crown and murmurs, "That's good, then."

*

The air is so cold, and the night sky so clear, that in spite of the yellow-orange lights around her building, the stars show bright and sparkling against the dark. She's been up there, but the stars still catch her by the throat when she notices them on Earth. 

Trash still needs to be taken out. She never quite understands where trash on the TARDIS goes, but back in her flat, she has to run down the stairs and go to the bins in the cold, her socks and boots and his cardigan not quite keeping the chill out of her bones as she dashes outside. She doesn't mean to look up as she's coming back in, but she sees the stars from the landing and stops and stares. 

She sees Orion clearly. She sees Gemini. She's seen these constellations from different angles, knows them by names in languages that are long dead and languages that have yet to be formed. But it's on Earth where she feels the most amazed by them. Half of the stars she sees have already burned out of existence, and the dark spaces are burning with new life that simply hasn't reached her yet. There is one, blueish-white, that captivates her particularly and her mind starts drifting as she wonders what sort of life exists around it.

Clara isn't sure how long she's standing there, but when the Doctor says, "Would you like to visit that one?" the warmth of his breath against her cool skin makes her gasp. She turns to face him; he's standing inches from her, his hands clasped behind his back, and even though his face is cut deep with shadows she can tell that he's been looking at her the way she'd been looking at the night sky. 

The Doctor has always lied and always will. But there is a brutal, raw honesty in the looks this version of him gives her. And it's there in the touch of his long fingers to her skin. It's there in the way she's carved and clawed her way into his veins, the way he dizzies from her mouth on his. Clara is not sure how sustainable this relationship is, how long it will be before he explodes and this ends. If she looked hard enough, she'd see unhealthy things growing inside of it. She's willing to at least try scrubbing it clean, for the sake of the honesty in the damp curls of his hair and the slight sheen of his skin when he's moving inside of her. 

She looks one more time to the sky before turning back to him. "Not yet," she says, and she takes his hand, pulls him up the steps, pulls him into her room, pulls him close enough that she can feel the beats of his hearts speeding up against her.


End file.
